A new report of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program said that the Arctic region has been warming continuously since the 1970s. As a result, the retreat of sea ice has been found to be very significant in the Arctic under global warming, creating conditions for navigation in the Arctic. 

In view of this, a research team led by KANG Shichang from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources (NIEER) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has investigated the change of arctic sea ice in the future and navigation status. Results have been published on The Cryosphere.

They evaluated decadal changes in sea ice parameters using multiple models, and assessed Arctic navigability under two shared socioeconomic paths (SSPs) and two ship classes with an Arctic transport accessibility model.

The sea ice extent was most likely to decrease along SSP 5-8.5 under current emissions and climate change, and the decadal rate of decreasing sea ice extent will increase in March but decrease in September. By 2060, with much of the multi-years ice completely disappear, Arctic sea ice will reach an irreversible tipping point in September, according to the researchers. 

Under SSP5-8.5, it will be less likely that ordinary merchant ships will be navigable in the next 10 years. The main navigable areas of the Northeast Passage will be the East Siberian Sea and the Northwest Laptev Sea, while the ice barriers of the Northwest Passage will be concentrated in the Canadian Arctic Island. 

In addition, by the middle of this century, ordinary merchant ships will be navigable in both the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage, and the best window will be from August to October. 

In the next 10 years, the navigable windows of Polar Class 6 (PC6) ships (with medium ice-breaking capacity) in the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage will be from October to December and September to October respectively, of which October will have the greatest navigable potential. 

By the middle of this century, the navigation window for PC6 ships in the Arctic will be expected to extend to January. 

Contact: 

KANG Shichang 

E-mail: shichang.kang@lzb.ac.cn 

State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Science, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China.